Luke Devine currently lectures at the University of Worcester. Luke holds a PhD in Jewish feminist theology and has specialist interests in Amy Levy, Lily Montagu, First and Second-Wave Jewish feminisms, and Shekhinah-theology. Luke has written extensively on Jewish feminist theology, including most recently, Second-Wave Jewish feminism, 1971-1991: Foundational Theology and Sacral Discourse (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2011).

Rethinking the Book of Esther: Proto-Feminism, Hermeneutic and Shechinah
Theology in the Poetry of Amy Levy

Rethinking the Book
of Esther: Feminist Hermeneutics and Shechinah Theology in the Poetry of Amy
Levy

Luke Devine,
University of Worcester, United Kingdom

Abstract

In this essay, Amy Levy’s biblical hermeneutic on
Esther 9:22 is examined. Levy was an acculturated Anglo-Jewish woman triply
marginalized by the upper-middle-class community of which her family belonged
and that afforded women little intellectual space, the conservative Reform
Judaism of the period, and as an obviously Jewish woman socializing in
predominantly Christian circles. In the process of reengaging with the biblical
texts, Levy, by her own figuring an exile in every sense, develops relational
theological perspectives through imagery and themes resonant of Shechinah, the
presence of God in exile since the destruction of the Temple. By doing so,
Levy’s poetry visualizes the eschatological prospect of return and restoration
to come; these proto-feminist hermeneutics also insert the symbols and language
of divine presence into the Esther narrative, which conventionally makes no
direct reference to the divine. This is important as Jewish feminist theology
is generally considered to be a Second-Wave phenomenon. Moreover, the recovery
of the sacral elements of the Levy corpus is vital to our awareness of
previously marginalized, and even forgotten, Anglo-Jewish women writing
theology in the late-Victorian period.

Amy Judith Levy
(1861-1889) was an Anglo-Jewish author, poet, and essayist whose reputation has
only recently been restored following a century of obscurity.[1] Levy is
the author of three poetry anthologies and three novels, not to mention
numerous short stories, and several articles for the Jewish Chronicle. Levy was born in Clapham, London into an affluent,
upper-middle-class, acculturated family; she was a member of the West London
Synagogue of British Jews, the product of a breakaway congregation from the
Bevis Marks Synagogue. Levy received a secular education at both Brighton High
School Girls’ Public Day School Trust and Cambridge University. Accordingly,
Levy maintained longstanding friendships with many non-Jewish intellectuals,
authors, and social activists. But in her own mind and in the eyes of others
she was marked out as a Jew; many of Levy’s friends and colleagues held
anti-Semitic opinions. Moreover, being both childless and unmarried she was
marginalized in the Jewish community also, which traditionally has always
placed emphasis on marriage, procreation, and the family. True, the tradition
was on the wane in the acculturated upper-middle-class milieu of which the Levy
family belonged, especially with the development of Reform Judaism. But the
community, at least from Levy’s perspective as a career-minded New Woman
determined to be financially independent of her parents, afforded little
intellectual and spiritual agency to women. Levy was estranged, however, not
only by Christian society and upper-middle-class Anglo-Jewry, but also by the
Reform Judaism of the period. Indeed, Anglo-Reformism had not upheld the proto-feminist
pledges of classical German Reform Judaism, nor had it initiated meaningful
transformation vis-à-vis the “Woman Question.” Thus, Levy, at least in her own
mind, was an exile in every sense. The classically Jewish theme of exilic
existence has been present since Adam and Eve were expelled from the garden.
Ever since the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE the feminine
Shechinah, God’s presence in the world, has been present with the exiles,
providing spiritual nourishment and protective immanence, nurturing the
expectation of eventual restoration. It is the eschatological yearning of
fulfillment to come and images resonant of the maternal and theological
intimacy of Shechinah that enabled Levy to re-connect with her own sense of
Jewishness and with the biblical tradition in ways that were not
contemporaneously available to her, and other women, within Anglo-Jewry’s
religious and communal institutions.

The extant scholarship has interpreted Amy Levy’s biography and career
through a multiplicity of perspectives. Scholars have understandably analyzed
Levy’s work as minority discourse; homoerotic and Sapphic themes have been read
into her poetry, as well as New Woman and social Darwinist perspectives; there
has also been focus on Levy’s aestheticism, and even atheism, the influence of
Christian Evangelicalism, and of classical Reform Judaism.[2] Indeed,
the Levy scholarship has been rich and varied. However, the understandable
emphasis on secular, acculturated, and First-Wave feminist themes, along with
assumptions regarding Levy’s atheism, has hindered any investigation into the
Jewish spiritual and theological aspects of the corpus. Alternatively, this
analysis will look at Levy’s hermeneutical poem, “The Lost Friend,” through
which she sets up an exegetical dialogue with the book of Esther. In the
process, Levy is able to implant proto-feminist and theological imagery into
the biblical narrative. This is significant, for one, given that the name of
God is not mentioned at all in Esther; second, because Jewish feminist theology
is generally considered to be a product of Second-Wave feminism in the United
States, and third, for the reason that the recovery of the esoteric and sacral
aspects of the Levy corpus are vital to our understanding of Anglo-Jewish
women’s religious experience and theological writing in the late-Victorian
period that might otherwise have been consigned to history.

In 1889 Amy Levy
committed suicide by charcoal asphyxiation and was subsequently buried by a
Reform rabbi at the Balls Pond Cemetery, London. She had been depressed for
many years; the condition was extenuated by physical ailments including
neuralgia, eye infections, abscesses, and deafness.[3]
Moreover, from her time at school in Brighton Levy had become increasingly
aware of anti-Semitic prejudice. Even though she was assimilated and had been
born in England, her surname and appearance, at least by her own
self-perception, marked her out as Jewish and different. And in terms of the
communal, legal, liturgical, and practical application of her faith, Levy was
estranged by the lack of intellectual and spiritual liberty allotted to women
in the Anglo-Reform congregation. That women were precluded from the study and
authoritative interpretation of the sacred texts must have been a bugbear for
Levy, as well as the exemption of women from time-bound positive mitzvot.[4]
More so, the exclusion of women from the minyan, the segregation of the
sexes in the synagogue, women’s inadmissibility as legal witnesses, the
inability to be called up to read the Torah (aliyah), and the prohibition
on women holding communal positions of authority over men would have been
equally limiting for a woman already feeling peripheral. It was through her
poetry that Levy found a spiritual outlet and a means of conscious and
unconscious re-engagement with images and language resonant with recurrent and
traditional Jewish imagery.

“The Lost Friend” is a hermeneutic/midrash that looks at the book of
Esther, or Megilah. It is plain to see why Amy Levy was fascinated by the
biblical narrative. It was in the Victorian period that the figure and
iconography of Esther began to appear in popular fiction, including in
Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848),
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859), and Felix Holt
(1866); Israel Zangwill’s Children of the Ghetto: A Study of a
Peculiar People (1892); and in
proto-feminist biblical biography, such as in Grace Aguilar’s Women
of Israel (1851), and in Elizabeth Cady
Stanton’s The Woman’s Bible
(1895, 1898).[5] This is not to mention the many novels
that explore and appropriate themes and characters from the book of Esther.
Indeed, in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) Ezra Mordecai Cohen is seemingly based on the biblical character
of his name. We know that Levy read Daniel Deronda because in “The Jew in Fiction,” an article for the Jewish
Chronicle, she calls on writers to present
a more realistic appraisal of the Jewish community. Moreover, Levy’s novel, Reuben
Sachs, is a response to the Zionist
overtones present in Daniel Deronda and
its romanticized assumption that Anglo-Jews, despite their assimilation,
intended to “return” to Palestine.[6] Levy might have read the Megilah
during the feast of Purim. It is a mitzvah that the victory of Haman be
publicized; therefore, the reading must be in public and each religionist, both
men and women (even given their exclusion from the minyan and the prohibition on hearing a woman’s voice in
public, kol isha), must read the
text aloud. Esther, like Levy, is an exile living in the midst of a foreign
nation (the Persian Empire); she too experiences the issues of assimilation and
potential social absorption; Jewish identity is under threat and survival is
not guaranteed. Reflecting her acculturation, the name Esther is taken from a
Babylonian goddess, even though she was born Hadassah. Indeed, “this is the
virtuous Esther who is called Hadassah” (Megilah 10b),[7] “Why
then was she called Esther? Because she concealed … the facts about herself, as
it says, Esther did not make known her people or her kindred” (13a).

The book of Esther has been interpreted as a work of fiction and was
probably written during the late Persian to early Hellenistic period. The
biblical narrative most likely seeks to encourage exilic Jews that they too,
like Esther and Mordecai, can prosper in the Persian realm.[8] In
short, the book of Esther is the story of how a young Jewish woman, Esther,
becomes the wife of Ahasuerus, the Persian king, and is able to save the Jewish
people from a genocidal massacre at the hands of the evil Haman. Unaware of her
Jewish heritage, Ahasuerus selects Esther, an orphan, for his new wife
following Vashti’s disobedience in refusing to dance for him. Meanwhile, the
Prime Minister, Haman, equally ignorant of Esther’s Jewishness, plots to obtain
a decree from his king permitting the wholesale murder of the Jews. Following
persuasion from her guardian-cousin, Mordecai, Esther warns Ahasuerus of
Haman’s despicable scheme and reveals her own crypto-Jewish ancestry. Ahasuerus
retires to the gardens of the palace only to return and find Haman sat
suggestively on the bed with Esther. Thus, Haman is executed and Mordecai is elevated
to Prime Minister.

It is in Amy Levy’s novel, Reuben Sachs, that the author first demonstrates a fascination with the book of
Esther. Indeed, the character Esther Kohnthal reveals her own “theory” on
Esther’s marriage to Ahasuerus when Reuben reveals that the dilettante convert
to Judaism, Bertie Lee-Harrison, idealizes the protagonist of the novel, Judith
Quixano, as a modern incarnation of “Queen Esther”:

“Yes it
is Bertie.” Reuben looked straight in Judith eyes. “He says you exactly fulfill
his idea of Queen Esther.”

“Ah,”
cried Esther Kohnthal, “I have always had a theory about her. When she was kneeling at the feet of
that detestable Ahasuerus, she was thinking all the time of some young Jew whom
she mashed, and who mashed her, and whom she renounced for the sake of her
people”!

A
momentary silence fell among them, then Reuben, looking down, said slowly: “Or
perhaps she preferred the splendours of the royal position even to the attractions
of that youth whom you supper her to – er – have mashed [fancied].”[9]

Esther
Kohnthal’s lament reminds that even though Esther is the hero of the biblical
narrative, she must marry a non-Jew to ensure the preservation of her people,
eschewing her own personal feelings and aspirations. Certainly, it is Esther
who takes the risks; it is Esther who informs Ahasuerus of Haman’s evil plot
not knowing how he might react; it is Esther who reveals her Jewish ethnicity
to an unaware Ahasuerus; and it is Esther who persuades Ahasuerus to allow the
innocent Jews to defend themselves (7-8). Yet, it is Mordecai who is rewarded
with promotion to Prime Minister (10:3), while alternatively Esther is
condemned to a loveless marriage with a non-Jew. Certainly, Esther did not
choose of her own freewill to marry Ahasuerus (2:8); she reveals her Jewish
ancestry only when completely necessary (7:3-4), and only after considerable
pressure from her cousin-guardian (4:4-16).[10] Megilah 13b is clear:
“Esther did the commandment of Mordecai.” Because of this, contemporary
feminist analyses of Esther have been in the main, though not exclusively, both
cautious and negative. Indeed, while Esther is beautiful and valiant, it is
Mordecai who saves the life of the king, it is he who learns of Haman’s evil
plot, and it is he who instructs Esther to conceal her Jewish ancestry while at
the same time loudly proclaiming his own Jewishness. Accordingly, while it is
Esther who takes the risks for the sake of the Jewish people, her resistance
and actions are effectively passive.[11]
The feminist implications of the story are undergirded by patriarchal
structures and the fixed biological stereotypes assigned to women in the
biblical period. Indeed, Vashti, who refuses to dance, is demonized because she
attempts to usurp the patriarchal order, while Esther is “acceptable” because
she conforms to Mordecai’s wishes. It was not lost on Levy that Esther’s
subjective agency is subsumed by both Mordecai’s advice and her desire to
appease the king. In Reuben Sachs
it is Judith who like Esther can save the Jewish people, but in the end they
are both consigned to loveless marriages with non-Jews. Moreover, while
Judith’s intellectual and spiritual potential is suppressed by
upper-middle-class economic acquisitiveness, Esther too, who is similarly
gifted, is merely Mordecai’s vessel. Thus, rather than being interested in the
feminist implications of Esther, it is the preclusion of any theological
elements that drives Levy’s hermeneutical poem, “The Lost Friend.” Levy’s poem
will fill in a missing scene that will account for the absence of the divine.

“The Lost Friend,” which
appears in Amy Levy’s final poetry collection, A London-Plane Tree, begins with an
epigraph:

The poem is replete with biblical images and
symbols, through words such as “joy,” “faith,” “sorrow,” “treasure,” and
“heart.” The passage: “In some far land we wandered, long ago,” places the poem
within an exilic tradition, while the line, “And never shall I hail that other
‘friend,’” hints towards rejection of the Christian theological tradition that
will “dog my footsteps to the end.” Had the word “friend” been capitalized the
reader might have inferred reference to Kadosh Barukh Hu, the Holy One, blessed
be He, similar to that which also appears in Reuben Sachs. Indeed, Esther
Kohnthal refuses to attend synagogue and it reads (note the capitalization of
“Friend”) that “Esther was not in synagogue. She had had a sharp wrangle with
her mother the night before, which had ended in her staying in bed with Good-bye,
Sweetheart!
for company. She, poor soul, was of those who deny utterly the existence of the
Friend of whom she stood so sorely in need.”[13]Esther’s spiritual alienation is reflected in
Johann Goethe’s epigraph that in its original German Levy includes in Reuben
Sachs,
here translated: “Who ne’er his bread in sorrow ate, / Who ne’er the mournful
midnight hours / Weeping on his bed has sate, / He knows you not, ye Heavenly
Powers.”[14] Even so, the novel imitates that the
narrator maintains a modicum of faith in the divine, the “Friend.”

In the first verse of
“The Lost Friend” Amy Levy connects exilic themes with feminine presence, known
retrospectively as Shechinah. Even in the diaspora Jewish men and women can
enjoy the protection of the “wings of the Shechinah” (Shabbath 31a), no matter
where they might be geographically. In the poem, it is an image resonant of
Shechinah that is the “face of sorrow,” saddened by the physical and spiritual
exile of her children; with “Her voice” she “turns and treads … at her ease”;
she can bestow her gifts (“her dreary largess”) and her generosity, she is a
physical manifestation; her “face,” “voice,” and “hands” are perceivable. In
contrast to the radical separation of the individual and the unknowable, the
feminine presence of the divine, Shechinah, is non-hierarchical and experienced
by humans; she is immanent. Shechinah is the way that the aloof, indefinable,
and incomprehensible deity can relate to the Jewish people in exile. In fact,
Shechinah is one in the same with “glory” (kavod) and with the Holy
Spirit. This is the aspect of God that human can experience, as they can never
know divine reality. Thus, Shechinah is a synonym for God rather than a challenge
to the all powerful Kadosh Barukh Hu.[15] Shechinah is both accessible and
feminine; she is, as Melissa Raphael points out, not a separate goddess but
symbolic of the maternal intimacy of the divine presence and an aspect of God
that can be reclaimed from patriarchy.[16] Indeed, Shechinah has
been appropriated by contemporary feminist theologians as an alternative to the
hierarchical and aloof nature of Kadosh Barukh Hu, though primarily
interest has been in the Kabbalistic tradition rather than the rabbinic.
Theologians have particularly associated with Shechinah’s exile. In the
classical Kabbalah, Shechinah occupies the bottom rung (Malkuth) of the Sephirot (emanations); she is
the female element of the divine, while in the Lurianic tradition Shechinah is
the last of the modified partzufim (countenances), Nukvah, who continues to be in
exile following Adam’s sin and must re-unite with Little Face, named Zeir
Anpin. In each tradition, the feminine Shechinah is alienated from the
masculine; in the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria the reunion of the masculine and the
feminine will bring about tikkun: repair and restoration.[17]
Shechinah is the connector between the earthly and the divine realms; she is
the perceivable manifestation of God in this world. It is the relational and
non-hierarchical aspects of the Shechinah, her exile and even her subordination
that has been taken on by Jewish feminist theologians who see their own
experience and that of Jewish women in general reflected in her.[18]
This is not to say that Levy’s imaging of exilic and feminine symbols and the
allusions to Shechinah somehow makes her a precursor, or progenitor, to
contemporary feminist theologians; rather, it is more that “The Lost Friend” is
an early proto-feminist effort by a Jewish woman both alienated by and
unfamiliar with the specifics of classical Jewish theology to distinguish
between the feminine presence we know and experience and the unknowable and
un-relatable Kadosh Barukh Hu. This places Levy within a historical community
of Jewish women both estranged by, and in the main untrained in, traditional
theology, though intent on forging connections with feminine and relatable
images of deity beyond the masculinist imagery and symbology of the divine
present in the biblical and rabbinic texts.

In the second verse it
is “sorrow” that is countered with imagery resonant of Shechinah, who mourns
her exile; she is “Joy”; “In some far land” the speaker recalls, “we wandered,
long ago.” It is too difficult for the speaker to accept their spiritual exile;
the incessant yearning for homeland is too much. Thus, “Joy is my friend, not
sorrow.” “Joy” is the prospect of return, as in Isaiah 35:10: “the ransomed of
the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with songs and everlasting joy upon
their heads: they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall
flee away.” Indeed, with the restoration of Zion “everlasting joy shall be unto
them” (61:7). The speaker can only imagine what this “far land we wandered”
might look like given that it is “long ago.” The exilic theme of wandering is
integral to Jewish self-understanding and diasporic experience and can be
traced back to Genesis: Adam and Eve become exiles when they are expelled from
the Garden of Eden; when Cain murders his brother, as punishment, he becomes
the first archetypal wanderer; the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are
nomads, the promise of a homeland is not fulfilled in their lifetime; the
fledgling nation of Israel wanders the wilderness in between their escape from
Egypt and the quest for the Promised Land. In fact, wandering is a theological
image of God’s judgment. The speaker’s attachment to their exile and to the
prospect of endless wandering, as well as to the comforting visions of feminine
presence interpretable as Shechinah, are reassuring connectors to the ancestral
tradition and to the inclusiveness of collective memory and shared experience;
it is “we” who “wandered” “by strange seas” in a distant land, “long ago.”

In the third verse, the
speaker acknowledges that the “Joy” of return and the prospect of spiritual
reengagement with Jerusalem are impossible; rather, it is the eschatological possibility of restoration that is
nourishing. The narrator’s faith “knows no faltering”! She longs, incessantly,
for the “vanished treasure of her [Shechinah’s] hands and face”! The experience
of exile and the feminine imagery are one in the same, conjuring images of the
Temple’s destruction and the release of the Shechinah; she too is in exile with
the diasporic communities. The speaker clings to the memory of her “Beloved.”
This feminine presence will hold “her place” – “Unmoved within my heart” – the
engine of desire and yearning. This is in contrast to the Christian theological
tradition, the “other ‘friend’” referred to in the closing lines, and the
threat of assimilation, even conversion that will be ever present in Amy Levy’s
personal exile. Indeed, the speaker of the poem laments that the exile is
permanent; the experience of “Joy” – the concept of restoration that will bring
“everlasting joy” to the exiles (Isaiah 35:10) – will never be reality. This is
the sorrowful countenance of Levy’s feminine presence, “the treasure of her
hands and face,” that recalls Shechinah and her presence among the exiles. This
is the spiritual connection with the divine that the speaker craves within her
“heart,” it is inclusive and inspiring; “faith, long tried” has been rewarded.

In “The Lost Friend,”
Amy Levy focuses on Esther 9:22: “As the days wherein the Jews rested from
their enemies, and the month which was turned unto them from sorrow to joy, and
from mourning into a good day; that they should make them days of feasting and
joy, and of sending portions one to another, and gifts to the poor”; it could
be seen in the push and pull between the polarizing concepts of “sorrow” and
“joy” in the poem, figured in the biblical text as the moment when the terrible
situation is “turned upside down,” or “ve-nahafokh hu” (9:1). Equally, 9:22
is significant because it can be interpreted as revealing the indirect presence
of God in the words: “the month which was turned unto them from sorrow to joy,
and from mourning into a good day.” As seen earlier, “The Lost Friend” is a
see-saw between the biblical imagery of “sorrow,” which is the experience of
exile, and “Joy” which is the product of return and restoration to Zion, the
“land we wandered,” and the “vanished treasure of her hands and face,” the
Shechinah. It is in Esther that the reader has a window into life in exile: the
Jewish minority group has few rights; they are continually under threat from
the imposition of non-Jewish and pagan religious practices; they are vulnerable
to the dominant political structure, and they are continually yearning for
return to the homeland.[19] Certainly, Esther speaks to Levy’s
own sense of marginality. But it is the nonappearance of God in the biblical
text that is the cornerstone of the hermeneutic. The absence of the divine in
Esther has been explained in a number of ways. According to Megilah 7b
religionists should be suitably intoxicated so as not to be able to tell the
difference between Mordecai and Haman. For those Jews afraid of violating the
prohibition on mentioning the name of God, the reading of Esther while under
the influence of alcohol is a dangerous process; hence, the references to the
divine were removed, or so the explanation goes. In fact, there are possible
hints towards God’s presence in the mysterious reference to deliverance
arriving from another place (4:14).[20] But at least directly, God is absent
from the biblical narrative. In “The Lost Friend” Levy is figuring concepts of
exile, femininity, and divine presence that retrospectively can be associated
with Shechinah. She is “the face of sorrow,” in the exile “Where sorrow long
abides” that can become “Joy” in the “far land”; the “beloved – to whose memory
I cling, / Unmoved within my heart she holds her place”; she can fill the
theological void of the biblical text.

It was in the final few
weeks of her life that Amy Levy corrected the proofs for the poetry collection,
A London Plane-Tree. The final entry into her diary, written on September 8,
merely states: “alone at home all day.”[21] In the months prior to
her suicide Levy’s creativity seems to have been at its greatest. Indeed, in
1888 Reuben Sachs
was published, along with Romance of a Shop and in 1889 “Cohen of
Trinity,” “Readers at the British Museum,” Miss Meredith, and a number of
short-stories, essays, and poems.[22] But despite the productive output,
Levy’s friend, Bella Duffy, observed a marked deterioration in her mental and
physical state: “I had miserable scraps of notes from her all the time I was at
Brighton, telling me she was ill, but just at the last, speaking of herself as very ill. Her last note …
told me she had been for three days at the seaside with Olive Schreiner, but
feeling no better, she had returned [to] London and “crept back into her hole.”[23]
In a letter, Olive Schreiner also mentions Levy’s unstable state of mind and
that she was unable to help her:

I should have written yesterday but I had
a blow that somewhat unfitted me. My dear friend Amy Levy had died the night
before. She killed herself by shutting herself up in a room with charcoal. We
had been away together for three days last week. But it did not seem to help
her; her agony had gone past human help. The last thing I sent was the “Have
Faith” page of Towards Democracy.
She wrote me back a little note, “Thank you, it is very beautiful, but
philosophy can’t help me. I am too much shut in with the personal.”[24]

The exact reasons for
Levy’s suicide, however, can never be known given that the majority of her
personal papers were destroyed by the family in the weeks following her death.
Evidently, suicide was a factor in Levy’s thinking when she completed her final
poetry anthology, A London Plane-Tree, as is apparent in “The Promise of Sleep,” one
of several poems in the Levy corpus that approaches issues of death and
suicide:

Poems such as this one,
in retrospect, read as prophetic, but they reveal only an obsession with
suicide, pessimism, and depression, not the root causes. In the final weeks of
her life Levy became increasingly interested in notions of the soul; she
discussed the matter with a former member of the Society for Psychical
research.[26] It is in “The Lost Friend” that Levy
reaches out to both the ancestral faith and to the thematic of divine intimacy.
It is possible to speculate that there is a correlation between the poem and
Levy’s suicide by way of a last effort to re-engage with the divine in the only
way she knew how, through poetry.

Amy Levy was a
marginalized figure in both the Jewish community and in Christian society. This
estrangement was extenuated by her status as a single, childless unattached
woman, and by the limited intellectual space available to women in the
upper-middle-class, acculturated milieu. In secular intellectual and bohemian
circles, Levy was acutely aware of her Jewish identity, appearance, and faith,
which in her own mind, and in the eyes of others, marked her out as different.
It was in her poetry that Levy concretized and responded to her feelings of
alienation. In “The Lost Friend,” Levy is able to reengage with her Jewish identity
through a limited understanding of the classical exilic and theological
traditions, leading to an encounter with feminine divine presence, figured
retrospectively as Shechinah. In the process of connection, Levy amplifies the
theological possibilities of Esther 9:22. By doing so, Levy unconsciously
joined a growing list of contemporary feminist theologians who have turned to
the maternal and feminine aspects of the divine, known popularly as the
Shechinah.

[2] For those
unfamiliar with the Levy corpus see The Complete Novels and Selected
Writings of Amy Levy, ed. Melvyn New
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993). For Levy’s critique of the
Christian literary tradition see Cynthia Scheinberg, Women’s Poetry
and Religion in Victorian England: Jewish Identity and Christian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002);
“Canonizing the Jew: Amy Levy’s Challenge to Victorian Poetic Identity,” Victorian
Studies 39 (1996): 173-200. For the New
Woman perspectives see Iveta Jusova, The New Woman and the Empire (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005); for
the influence of Christian Evangelicalism and social Darwinism see Nadia
Valman, The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007);
“‘Barbarous and Mediaeval’: Jewish Marriage in Fin de Siècle English Fiction,”
in The Image of the Jew in European Liberal Culture, 1789-1914, eds. Bryan Cheyette and Nadia Valman (London:
Vallentine Mitchell, 2004), 111-29. For the urban aestheticism see Ana Parejo
Vadillo, Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism: Passengers of Modernity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). For
identity criticism see Sarah Minsloff, “Amy Levy and Identity Criticism: A
Review of Recent Work,” Literature Compass 4, no. 4 (2007): 1318-29. For biographical accounts of Levy’s life and
work see Linda Hunt Beckman, Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000); Christine
Pullen, The Woman Who Dared: A Biography of Amy Levy (Kingston: Kingston University Press, 2010). For
Levy and Reform Judaism, including her midrashim, see my From Anglo-First-Wave towards American Second-Wave Jewish
Feminism: Negotiating with Jewish Feminist Theology and its Communities in the
Writing of Amy Levy (Piscataway: Gorgias Press,
2010).

[7] All
Talmudic references are taken from The Babylonian Talmud, ed. and trans. Isidore Epstein, at Halakhah.com,
http://www.halakhah.com/. See Megilah 10b-14a for rabbinic analysis of Esther.

[8] See Sidnie White Crawford, “Esther: Esther in the
Hebrew Bible,” in Women in Scripture: A Dictionary of Named and Unnamed
Women in the Hebrew Bible, the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books and the New
Testament, ed. Carol Meyers et al.
(Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2000), 75. The inclusion of Esther in the Jewish canon
was initially a source of division among the ancient rabbis; a number expressed
disdain for the feast of Purim given that there was no legal sanction for the
festival. Moses Maimonides, however, among others, recognized that the
boisterous celebrations were popular among exilic Jews. His support guaranteed
the story’s inclusion in the canon. Consequently, by using Exodus 17:14 the
rabbis were able to connect Haman’s ancestry to the Amalekites, a classical
enemy of the Jewish people to justify the book’s inclusion.

[11] See Celina Spiegel, “The World
Remade: The Book of Esther,” in Out of the Garden, Women Writers on the
Bible, eds. Christina Buchmann and Celina Spiegel
(London: Harper Collins Publishers, 1994), 192,
196. According to Aviva Cantor Esther is an “altruistic-assertive
enabler.” Indeed, Esther’s becoming queen and at the same time surviving as a
crypto-Jew is all because Mordecai thought it best (which reflects her
altruism), while asking the king to spare her people is “assertive.” By
contrast, Vashti, who refuses to dance for the king and is stripped of her
crown, is counter to the altruistic-assertive enabler. The punishment of Vashti
implies, according to Cantor, that Jewish women must “be enablers ... or else”
(“The Lilith Question,” in On Being a Jewish Feminist:A Reader, ed. Susannah Heschel
(1983; rpt. New York: Schocken Books 1995), 47).

[12]Levy, A
London Plane-Tree, 71. According to Linda
Hunt Beckman, “The Lost Friend” is neither difficult to interpret nor is it
multi-tenored, although it is far more anguished than the majority of Levy’s
poems and is explicitly figurative (metaphorical). Hunt Beckman argues that the
lover whose loss the narrator laments is the vehicle and joyful element of her
personality, the tenor of this metaphor. Thus, Levy personifies both joy and
sorrow, insisting that “Joy is my friend, not sorrow,” and that “In some far
land we wandered long ago.” For Hunt Beckman, the poem then goes on to exude
“joy” in an outburst of passion: “O vanished treasure of her hands and face”!
In sum, Hunt Beckman argues that Levy, particularly in “The Lost Friend,”
writes poetry in which the author/speaker is giving voice to her own inner
sense of alienation (Amy Levy, 195-96; see also Hunt Beckman’s “Amy Levy:
Urban Poetry, Poetic Innovation and the Fin-de-Siècle Woman Poet,” in The
Fin-de-Siècle Poem: English Literary Culture and the 1890s, ed. Joseph
Bristow (Athens: Ohio UP, 2005), 224).

[15] In the
Talmudic codices, Shechinah is frequently interpretable as an independent
presence. Indeed, in Sukkah 5a: “the Almighty spread some of the radiance of
his Shechinah and his cloud upon him,” while in Sotah 5a: “the Holy One,
blessed be He, ignored all the mountains and heights and caused His Shechinah
to abide upon Mount Sinai.” These examples suggest that Shechinah is an entity
separable from the Ultimate. In the Midrashic literature Shechinah becomes an
autonomous feminine entity capable of challenging Kadosh Barukh Hu, as Rabbi Aha implies: “The Holy Spirit [Shechinah]
comes to the defence … saying first to Israel: ‘Be not a witness against thy
neighbor without a cause,’ and thereafter saying to God: ‘Say not: I will do to
him as he hath done to me.’” In another source, Rabbi Aha refers to a
specifically feminine presence: “When the Shekhina left the Sanctuary, she
returned to caress and kiss the walls and columns.” Similarly, the literature
tells of two rebellious contemporaries of Moses named Nadab and Abihu who
“feasted their eyes on the Shekhina, but had no enjoyment from her; Moses, on
the other hand, did not feast his eyes on her, but enjoyed her”; see Raphael
Patai, The Hebrew Goddess (1967; rpt. Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 1990), 96, 99, 103-108.

[17]Lynn Gottlieb
argues that Shechinah imagery can become a wellspring of feminine and
theological inspiration: “Waxing and waning moon, evening and morning star,
mirror, well of waters, primordial sea, rose amid the thorns, lily of the
valley, Mother Wisdom, the oral tradition of the Torah, Womb of Emanations,
gateway and door, house and sacred shrine, doe, dove, mother eagle, serpent,
the soul of women ancestors, the community of Israel, the Sabbath Queen and
Bride, the Tree of Life, the menorah, and the earth itself belong to the poetic
constellation of the Shekhinah” (She Who Dwells Within: A Feminist Vision of
a New Judaism
(New York: Harper San Francisco, 1995), 22).

[18] In her feminist theology of the Holocaust, Raphael
images the Shechinah’s presence with the victims: “In Auschwitz, in her grief,
Shekhinah would have drawn her scorched, blackened wings around her and seemed,
therefore, to disappear. But she was still there, because there is no place
where she is not” (The Female Face,
154).

[24]Olive
Schreiner, quoted by Hunt Beckman, Amy Levy,
201. According to Hunt Beckman, Levy’s unstable emotional life might
have been a causal factor; thus, “Levy found it much easier to achieve literary
success than to establish an enduring attachment that might have stabilized her
emotional life. Her shyness and hearing loss are probably factors, but these
did not keep her from establishing deep and durable friendships” (Amy Levy, 202-03). Similarly,
Gail Cunningham suggests that Levy’s “outsider” status, as well as paranoia
regarding her physical appearance, might have been the cause: “Set apart from
societal norms by race, education, gender, political conviction, and perhaps
sexuality, the conditions of both body and mind encouraged her
self-construction as the paradigmatic outsider. Acutely sensitive to physical
appearance, she clearly felt that her classically Jewish features rendered her
unattractive in the largely gentile, intellectual circles to which her
education introduced her” (“Between Two Stools: Exclusion and
Unfitness in Amy Levy’s Short Stories,” in Amy Levy: Critical Essays, eds. Naomi Hetherington
and Nadia Valman (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010),
72-73).

Crawford,
Sidnie White. “Esther: Esther in the Hebrew Bible.” In Women in Scripture: A
Dictionary of Named and Unnamed Women in the Hebrew Bible, the
Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books and the New Testament, edited by Carol Meyers et al., 74-77. Cambridge:
Eerdmans, 2000.

Valman,
Nadia. “‘Barbarous and Mediaeval’: Jewish Marriage in Fin de Siècle English
Fiction.” In The Image of the Jew in European Liberal Culture, 1789-1914, edited by Bryan Cheyette and Nadia Valman (London:
Vallentine Mitchell, 2004), 111-29.

_____. The
Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Zangwill,
Israel. Children of the Ghetto: A Study of a Peculiar People. 1892; rpt. London: Henry Pordes, 1998.

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